All men are created fair

BAGEHOT supposes that you are reading this column in search of political commentary, not literary criticism. But the words that politicians use can frame a political debate. This applies even to a budget speech, when it is natural for the listener to leap over a chancellor's preamble and concentrate on the numbers. This year, that would be a mistake.

Look at how Gordon Brown opened his speech. This, he said, was a budget for a “new economy” and a “new century”. It would end a century of “sterile debate” between left and right. These are not modest claims. But what a contrast between the brashness with which Mr Brown opened and the banality of the announcements that followed. There were the usual tinkerings with tax bands and some eye-catching gimmicks: incentives for R&D in small firms; computers for teachers; tax-breaks for firms who lend workers bicycles to get to the office. There were also bigger measures, such as the overdue abolition of mortgage tax relief. And buried apologetically in the small print some redistribution—less than in the last budget—from richer to poorer. Otherwise, it was budget day as usual.

Why complain? Budgets can provoke worse reactions than a sense of anti-climax. It is good that Labour governments no longer provide expensive thrills such as top-rate income taxes of 98%, as they once did. But was the century of debate between left and right really all that “sterile”? Only if you accept Mr Brown's version of what the debate was about. He says that the argument was between “enterprise” and “fairness”, and that New Labour has ended this enervating quarrel by the simple expedient of declaring that both things matter after all. But this version of the past century's quarrel is not quite accurate. The quarrel was not about fairness, it was about equality. And these words have different meanings.

Parliament contains a small awkward squad of Labour types, such as Lord Hattersley, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn, who still dare to speak the language of equality. It is no surprise that the government itself prefers the word fairness. Whereas equality is a strong political idea whose meaning is clear, fairness (as any follower of the debate between “fair” and “free” trade will attest) is marvellously slippery. You know where an egalitarian government is coming from, what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. There are clear arguments to be made in favour of equality (relief of poverty, the encouragement of social cohesion); but there are also clear arguments to be made against imposing it (this is unnatural, unattainable, suppresses initiative, attempts self-defeatingly to create a sense of brotherhood by coercion). “Fairness”, by contrast, is a label a government can slap on pretty much any policy it chooses. Equality is measurable, fairness in the eye of the beholder. The left thought equality was fair; the right thought inequality was fair.

Thought? Still think, surely. Of the separate meanings of equality, only one has become uncontroversial: that for all their unequal endowments, people have equal worth: “A man's a man for a' that,” said Robbie Burns. Otherwise, far from being sterile, the debate about equality should have become more urgent with growing affluence. Once the state has rooted out absolute poverty, how much wealth, if any, should it confiscate to reduce inequality for its own sake? How much should it curtail individual freedoms—to purchase extra education, to pass on an inheritance—so that people have an equal chance in life? Is there some level beyond which inequality cannot be stretched without snapping the bonds that hold people together?

Whatever the answer, these are questions a government should frame clearly, not bury in the obfuscation of “fairness”. Still less should a budget be so subtle that nobody can divine whether, why or how much a government believes in redistribution. Mr Brown has his admirable preoccupations: to wean the unemployed off welfare and into work, to make work pay, to increase educational opportunity. But what he thinks more broadly about equality is a fog. Sometimes it suits him to pose as an instinctive egalitarian, held back only by the need not to frighten the middle class. At other times he basks in his reputation as the Labour chancellor who runs capitalism better than the Tories. Wonder about this apparent conflict and you will be told that these are no longer mutually exclusive alternatives. New Labour is the promoter of enterprise and (that flexible word) fairness alike, the previously perceived conflict between these things, which fired people up for a century, having now been revealed on closer inspection to have been “sterile” all along. This is brilliant politics, but it impoverishes political debate.

People on the left have as often been disappointed by Labour governments as those on the right have been alarmed by them. Half a century ago, R.H. Tawney likened Labour governments to those nice bachelors who stray into her novels of whom Jane Austen can find nothing more interesting to say than that “his countenance was pleasing and his manners gentleman-like”. The great socialist historian saw their “exaggerated discretion” as the characteristic failing of Labour governments.

As you might expect, this column does not share Tawney's disappointment. It likes Mr Brown's manners. It does not want him to be a bolder socialist. It welcomes the fact that the Labour Party has become less keen on equality-mongering (though arguably no less keen on bossing people about in a multitude of other ways, in the name variously of fairness or enterprise). But it is not just passion that has gone out of politics along the way. Some valuable clarity has been lost as well. People on both left and right—those outmoded categories—will miss it dearly.